Sean Rowe travels long, complicated road

After losing voice, singer took to woods

November 23, 2011|By Steve Knopper, Special to the Tribune

In his high school band, Savage Youth, Sean Rowe did not want to be the singer. He had sung in church groups as a kid, but he was in a self-conscious period, when he just wanted to play bass or guitar and not draw too much attention. But Savage Youth couldn't find a frontman, and Rowe's best friend, the band's guitarist, asked him to give it a shot.

Reluctantly, he stepped to the microphone. "I remember right around that time my voice dropping down about four notches," Rowe recalls. "They all thought it was satanic or something. Like, 'What the (expletive) happened there?' I remember we were covering Black Sabbath or something, so it was even more effective. They were all sold: 'You've got to be the singer!' ... That's when I realized I could do it kind of as a profession."

This is an extremely humorous story if you've ever heard the adult version of Rowe. A 36-year-old singer-songwriter from Troy, N.Y., Rowe traffics in that vocal region between Johnny Cash and Van Morrison, with the kind of tone that seems to keep getting deeper. His first album, "Magic," came out in his home region two years ago, but the record label Anti- picked up the album in February, helping to expand Rowe's audience from Troy-area coffeehouses to international club and theater tours.

It has been a long, complicated road to this point. When Rowe was about 17, he says in a phone interview from a tour stop in Los Angeles, "I kind of found my voice. And a lot of that had to do with voices I loved at that time, and still do — Otis Redding and John Lee Hooker and a lot of black music." Sometimes he was a full-time musician, and sometimes he worked on music between jobs in food service, human resources, kids counseling and house-painting. For a week, he was at a medical supply company, installing liners in test tubes for eight hours a day. "That stuff I wouldn't change," he adds. "It's all learning."

Roughly seven years ago, he started playing at open-mic nights, building up a small, local following. His songwriting was becoming almost as deep as his voice, with compositions such as "Old Black Dodge," a driving song with a sense of foreboding. "Old black Dodge on the side of the road," goes the first line. "Shouldn't have stopped/ but how could I know?" Rowe sings most of the verses in a friendly, conversational style, but he explodes occasionally into bursts of screaming, humming or borderline crying.

That song immediately caught the attention of Chris Wienk, vice president of radio for Rowe's hometown station, WEXT-FM. "It was very Tom Waits-y and very soulful — and very un-Tom Waits-y at the same time," he says. "He's got that big, huge ... baritone, and it kind of mumbles here and there. He also has, like, a Philadelphia-soul (sound) — very earthy and gritty and yet there's something that has that soul feel."

Rowe interrupted his music career in 2007 to indulge his other obsession — the outdoors. He enrolled in a survival school, Hawk Circle Wilderness Education, and lived there for a year. Afterward, in the fall, he went on a 24-day survival trek, carrying nothing but clothes and a pocketknife, finding his own food and shelter. "It was supposed to be 28 days — I got pretty hungry by the end," he says. "You got all kinds of weather — 75 degrees, sunshine and torrential rain and frost on the ground on some mornings. It was really just a test of myself ... and also to experience the raw reality of nature, and not view it as a museum piece, and actually to climb inside of it."

The long, quiet period in the woods came at a good time. The previous year, Rowe had been performing an intense number of shows, and he noticed his voice started to feel strange, "like somebody put a clamp on my throat." He couldn't hit the right notes. "It was shocking," he recalls. "I'd never had that before. I had that checked out by a couple of specialists. If you strain your voice, your vocal cords can get inflamed and sore. And what happens is to compensate for the notes you want to hit but can't, because of fatigue, your throat and neck muscles will be engaged — the wrong muscles. Once you lose those muscles, you're (expletive), because you can't use any sounds. I couldn't even talk."

It took him six months to recover, after which he changed his vocal approach completely. "You really got to take care of it. It's really an instrument that's the most delicate out there," Rowe says, in a flat, subdued voice that sounds far different from his singing voice. "You can't just buy a new reed for it."